Plant data helps climate models - GBIF award winner

The 2012 winner of the €30,000 Ebbe Nielsen Prize, Nathan Swenson, says the mobilization of data through GBIF will help to improve models predicting the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems.

Speaking before receiving the award, Swenson explained that understanding more about the relationship between climate and the distribution of plant functions, or ‘how plants make a living’ depended on the availability of large global datasets such as those made available through GBIF.

The Ebbe Nielsen Prize is an annual award of €30,000 which recognizes an early-career researcher whose work combines biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in a novel way. It was established in honour of the late Ebbe Nielsen, a Danish-Australian entomologist who was among the founders of GBIF.